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Study: Meet The Fascinating People Populating The Twitterverse

Margaret Ross, Editor

Margaret Ross

If you are new to Twitter this year, don't be intimated. We are the majority. Twitter newbies outnumber seasoned users by a large margin. Twitter enables people and companies to dip their toes into social media, 140 characters at a time.

You may be doing better than you thought. You could be a member of the tweet-elite and not even know it. That's one fascinating and fun part of the study.

According to the Sysomos study, if you have followed someone, have a follower, and tweeted something coherent; you win! Here's why.

At one in five Twitter accounts no one is home. This group of Twitter users is tweet-less. They have never posted a single tweet. Perhaps they are watching the game or are simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it. Imagine living in a land of headlines zooming by your eyes at 20 per second. Others clearly have unkind intent; I've encountered way too many spammers and twitter-squatters.

Ten Fascinating Stats Twitter Users

1. Mostly Newbies. 72.5% of all users in the study joined during the first five months of 2009. A known Twitter issue is its revolving door.

2. Most Say Little. 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day

21% of users have never posted a Tweet.

3. Chatter Kings. 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity. 10% of Twitter users account for 86% of the activity. Social Media may have a new Paretos Principle.

4. Follow Factor. 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.

5. Population Impact. User membership has geographic tendencies.

New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston.

6. Gender. There might be more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%). Study inferred gender based on the person's listed "real name."

7. Low-Actives. Half (50.4%) of all Twitter users are not "active." "Active" is defined as you have posed a tweet at some point in the last 7 days.

8. English Friendly. USA makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively.

9. Social Media Marketers and Geeks are Twitter's Path Lighters. 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as 'social media marketers'. They follow, tweet, and converse more than other groups.

10. Tuesday is Tweetday. Sysmos says Tuesday, during ET business hours, is the most popular time for Tweets and retweets, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.

APIs have been the key to Twitter's growth & utility. In terms of tools that people are using for Twitter, more than half (55%) of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others. The most popular API has been TweetDeck.

Define API: An application programming interface (API) is a set of routines, data structures, object classes and/or protocols provided by libraries and/or operating system services in order to support the building of applications.

Define User: Accounts, people, companies are called users.

About Methodology: Analyzed 11.5 Twitter accounts. Age is based on too small a sample to be relevant. Time period ended during May 2009. Gender was inferred by account holders stated "real name."